Issuing warnings about violence rumors is tricky

Editorial

Posted: Thursday, April 21, 2005

The voice on the other end of the phone Wednesday morning was that of a concerned parent. "Have you heard what's going on over at Clarke Central?" the woman asked. She then began to repeat a word-of-mouth story about an alleged threat that some students were to be killed at the school at some point in the day. Probably not coincidentally, Wednesday marked the sixth anniversary of the slayings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in which two students killed 12 fellow students and two teachers before turning their weapons on themselves.

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The telephone caller's concern was obviously for students at the school, but she was also concerned about the question of why school district officials hadn't done anything to alert students and parents to the rumors of the allegedly planned shootings.

While district officials didn't do anything to alert students and parents, that's not to say they simply sat idly by as the alleged threat developed. The plain truth is, school officials had begun hearing rumors some days in advance of Wednesday. Trouble was, the rumors were too vague for officials to track down any definitive information about who had threatened whom. That inability obviously left officials with too little on which to base any potential warning to parents.

But school district personnel continued to track any information that developed surrounding the rumors. At one point, they checked out a rumor that a message regarding plans for the alleged shootings had been written on a bathroom wall. No message was found, but district officials took the added step of checking out a student whose name had come up in connection with the message, and again came up empty.

Continuing to react to the situation, district officials talked with Athens-Clarke police about it, and arranged for officers to step up their patrols around Clarke Central High School on Wednesday. In addition, school officials brought a third school resource officer - a sworn police officer - into the school. Both Clarke Central and Cedar Shoals high schools are staffed with two school resource officers and two school district security officers.

The situation that developed at Clarke Central is indicative of the tricky place which school district officials - in Clarke County and elsewhere - find themselves when dealing with issues of threats of harm to schools and students. On the one hand, by not sounding an alarm at the threat of violence, they run the risk of seeing students injured or killed in what could have been a preventable incident. On the other hand, reacting too strongly to what turns out to be an unfounded threat puts school officials in the position of being held hostage by anyone - student or otherwise - who decides to pick up a telephone or scrawl a note and threaten to commit a violent act.

In the immediate wake of the Columbine High School shootings, for example, Clarke Central was plagued almost daily by bomb threats, and the school was evacuated each time. It was only after the school district modified its policy for dealing with such threats, establishing a threat assessment protocol that delayed any mass evacuation, that the threats eventually tapered off.

The district followed a similar path with the rumors of a Wednesday shooting at the high school, assessing and investigating the threat and, ultimately, going ahead with the school day. It seems a pretty common-sense approach to a situation for which there was no foolproof response. Still, the experience may indicate that school district officials should formally sit down with parents to get a clear sense of what parental expectations are when a school is faced with a threat of violence.